It's been raining for 12 hours straight.
The droplets slapped sideways against the soot-smeared windows of Dee's flat, blurring out Newcastle like the city had been half-deleted from memory. Grey light crawled in, but it wasn't welcome. Not much actually was that day.
She sat on the floor instead of the couch. It felt more honest that way. Phone in her hand. Screen still cracked from a drop two weeks ago, a fine spiderweb etched over her last message - like even the glass itself knew how fragile things were now.
Dee :: 2:43PM
Void? Everything alright? You've been awfully quiet today...
Delivered. Seen. Left to rot.
Dee stared at that line for so long the words lost shape. Just meaningless curves and pixels - an empty headline for a disappearance nobody would report.
She hadn't slept properly in two nights. She looked like shit. Which didn't surprise her. There was a unique ugliness that bloomed when hope started to decompose.
Miso hadn't left her side for a single moment, a feline sentinel curled in the crook of her hip. She'd stopped talking to him. It felt performative now, the kind of thing people do in movies when they want to appear stable. The truth was worse: Dee had nothing left to say.
The stupid part - the fucking insidious part - was that Void hadn't actually made her any promises. No confessions. No future talk. Just that steady, strange thing they'd built together. Late night voice notes. Silly nerd memes. Mutually broken flirtation. That uncanny moment when two distant people pressed up against a screen and thought, "You feel like me."
Dee had felt safe. Like she could for once in her fucking life unchain something that had rusted shut from years of neglect.
Despite being who she describes as "a crybaby," she didn't cry. That would've required something warm. Instead, Dee just folded in on herself. Every part of her wanted to scream at the screen: "Say something. Fucking anything. Just tell me why."
But she didn't feel like sending anything new. She wasn't that girl anymore. The one who begged. Oh no, that version of her had died on someone else's read receipt.
Still, the guilt fermented. Was it her fault? Had she taken too long? Been too careful? She wanted to take Void's face in her hands and scream, "I was trying not to hurt you!"
No one had ever understood how much effort it took her to even start feeling remotely safe. Let alone fall.
Dee chewed her thumbnail until it bled. Kept going on after. It felt like penance.
She glanced over to her art station. The sculpture still sat on the table, unfinished.
It had started as something light. Not joyful - Dee was still learning how to build joy - but hopeful. An abstract, asymmetrical spire of intertwining shapes, the kind of geometry that could pass for clever if you didn't look too long. She'd been calling it "hope" in her head. Quietly. Pathetically. It had angles that stretched skyward and a base too narrow to be stable - like every goddamn good thing in her life.
Now, in the cold gloom of the room, it looked more like a tombstone. Or a middle finger from the part of her that used to believe people when they said they wouldn't disappear.
She rose from the floor. Slow and stiff, her knees popping in protest. The room didn't welcome her movement - it merely tolerated it today. She walked to the table, eyes fixed on the thing she'd chiseled with great care.
She stood there as the burn behind her eyes climbed steadily, like smoke from a burning tire in a locked room. It wasn't art anymore - it was confession. The raw fucking nerve of trying.
She tried to remember what it felt like to sculpt for someone who mattered. Not for praise. Not for customers. For someone whose smile might make the hours disappear. Someone who might touch the edge of it and understand without asking.
And all she wanted to say, all she meant to say through every cut and curve was: "I care. I'm still here. I'm building something, even if all it does is break me."
But the silence on the other end turned that into a punchline.
Void had sent her pictures of her workbench. Her 3D printer. Her hoodie slung over some mechanical abomination. They'd even talked about shipping each other handmade trinkets. The idea felt sweet, once. Now it felt like trying to stitch a gaping wound with dental floss.
Her hand moved before she thought about it.
The sculpture hit the ground with a dull, reluctant thud - like even gravity didn't have the heart to hurt it. It slumped onto the laminate floor in one piece. No cracks. No drama. Just a soft collapse, still whole in all the wrong ways.
Dee stood over it, breath caught somewhere in her throat. Her hands twitched at her sides like they still expected something to break: maybe the sculpture, maybe her.
Miso appeared like a ghost with his white fur, winding around the fallen piece with unhurried purpose. The cat circled it once, then again, then curled protectively beside it like a ward. Tail flicking. Eyes sharp. Like he knew something she didn't. Like he was guarding more than just plastic and angles.
Dee crouched slowly, resting her arms on her knees, staring at the intact wreckage.
"Don't," her voice rasped. She wondered for a while whether she was talking to Miso, or trying to reignite hope within herself.
But the cat only blinked at her - quiet, unmoving.
She let out a shaky breath, not quite a sob, not quite a laugh: "Not even my metaphors shatter properly. Fuck's sake."
Afternoon bled into evening, indistinct and slow. She didn't turn on any lights. The dark suited her. She played one of Void's voice messages again - her voice crackling over speaker like a ghost left behind in the copper veins of the device.
"...Eitria's acting up again. I swear this thing is more emotionally unstable than I am."
Dee had laughed the first time she heard it. Now it just sounded like a warning. She stared at the screen long enough that it dimmed. Then she stared at her reflection in the black. Her face didn't look like hers anymore. It looked like someone who almost mattered.
She hadn't told Void everything - how bad it'd gotten before. The panic attacks. The days she couldn't even move from her bed. The weight she'd lost. The way she'd learned to apologize for her own intensity.
She hadn't told Void how scared she was that if she loved someone again, it would kill her.
Now, though, she wouldn't get to, she thought. Not if the silence stayed.
Night had fallen without grace - just dropped like a curtain no one asked for. Water drilled against the windows, insistent. Dee wondered if it was the rain that got loder, or if her flat was just that quiet now.
She sat hunched over her phone, thumbs hovered. Her fingers moved almost on muscle memory, drafting a message she didn't believe in but couldn't stop herself from writing.
Just let me know if you're alive.
"Too much."
Deleted.
I don't blame you.
"What the fuck did that even mean?"
Removed.
I miss talking to you.
"Pathetic."
Eviscerated.
One by one, each offering was carved out of her and thrown into the abyss until all that remained was the blinking cursor.
Dee set the phone down afraid the cracked screen might fully give in to the weight of her silence and pulled the blanket tighter around her body. Her knees curled to her chest. A tired, jagged question mark of a girl.
"Just what the fuck am I supposed to do with all this...?"